Your website is the fundamental component of your online presence. Whether it’s for your business, a personal portfolio or a hobby blog, it’s likely to be the focal point of contact between your brand and the audience you’re trying to reach. A well-built site will attract and convert customers in any industry.

1. Use a secure password.

Ordinarily, this should be a no-brainer, but you’d be shocked at the number of people who use basic passwords such as “Password” for secure logins. The password should be a complex one, ideally made up of multiple random words along with figures and special characters. That way, it’d be an arduous task to guess or break it with a brute-force program.

2. Keep all software updated.

Regardless of the platform on which you chose to host your site, updates are a persistent fact of a webmaster’s life. Check regularly for updates to your server’s operating system, plugins and other software. Many of those updates will include fixes to security lapses, and failure to update promptly will leave your site open to attacks. Hackers scan thousands of sites in hours looking for websites that have vulnerabilities in their software, so you need to stay on top of your game too.

3. Use a web-application firewall.

There are many types of firewalls you can use to protect your site, some hardware-based and others solely software. They analyze all bits of traffic in and out of your website server and prevent most hacking attempts. Nowadays, the most popular choices are cloud-based. There’ll be some upfront cost, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

4. Install SSL.

Have you noticed that some websites have a green icon in the corner of the URL field of your browser? That’s a badge showing that those sites have activated encrypted SSL protocol, which protects your user’s information as it’s shuttled between your website and database. The encryption makes it much more difficult for anyone to access your site and its traffic without authorization.

5.  Back up regularly.

If all the prior precautions fail and you still find yourself faced with a hacking, only a recent backup can help you recover fully. You can set the frequency to as often as you want, even up to multiple times a day. The more frequent the better, and it’s best to use a rolling save system so you have multiple backups available in case you need to isolate the exact time a problem occurred.